Symantec has brought out its ninth Internet Security Threat Report, providing a pretty comprehensive overview of the most recent trends. Here are some of the highlights, which underline that companies have to protect themselves against increasingly deliberate, professionally and financially-motivated attacks.
* The new threat landscape is shown to be increasingly dominated by attacks and malicious code that are used to commit cybercrime, criminal acts that incorporate a computer or Internet component. Attackers have moved away from large, multipurpose attacks on network perimeters and toward smaller, more focused attacks on client-side targets.
* Whereas traditional attack activity has been motivated by curiosity and a desire to show off technical virtuosity, many current threats are motivated by profit. They often attempt to perpetrate criminal acts, such as identity theft, extortion, and fraud, for financial gain.
* For the fifth consecutive reporting period, the Microsoft® SQL Server Resolution Service Stack Overflow Attack was the most common attack, accounting for 45% of all attacks.
* The average number of denial of service (DoS) attacks detected per day was 1,402, an increase of 51% from the first half of 2005.
* Financial services was the most frequently targeted industry.
